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I remember learning about this on the last day of Calculus class. It was probably the most dramatic classroom moment of any math class I took in college or high school

Lots of high schoolers who thought they knew math saw the first little hint that all these separate areas of the subject might be more related than they had imagined

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I think this really hits at why the identity is so famous: people tend to have been introduced to pieces in entirely separate ways, and from that perspective it’s quite surprising to see them all come together to create something nice.

> if this formula was not immediately apparent to a student upon being told it, that student would never become a first-class mathematician.

-- Carl Friedrich Gauss

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